Facebook Messenger to Bring Live Chat and Bots to Websites

As Businesses continue to use the messenger platform to build experiences that facilitate connection with customers and as Facebook has received a great feedback on its performance it now announces the 2.2 release which we believe will help developers and businesses reach their customers in new and engaging ways.

Facebook will be adding various features ie: Customer chat, Media CTA’s, New Tools.

Facebook’s new customer plugin will enable users to initiate a Facebook Messenger thread with a business on its own website. The new feature will be an add-on for businesses to integrate the Facebook Messenger chat option on their site. This will also enable them to maintain the thread within Messenger (on Facebook).

Customer Chat will be soon available for desktop and mobile devices. The feature is currently in closed beta. Facebook says that this feature was a highly requested feature, and adds a new level of utility to Messenger interaction.

The new customer chat option will be launching this week, with beta partners including Air France, Argos, Bodeaz, KLM, Mermaid Pillow, Volaris, and Zalando.

The other major features arriving with version 2.2 will include Media CTA’s and New tools.

Facebook’s launching a media template which will enable businesses to attach a CTA button to videos, images or GIF’s they share via Messenger.

This option will give businesses more ways to drive action in response to Messenger content and drive more engagement via sharing.

Talking about the new tool feature, it includes a Broadcast API – Facebook’s releasing their Broadcast API in open beta, which will let businesses send messages to multiple subscribers with a single API request.

“For example, a news publisher might use the Broadcast API to send breaking news alerts to all their subscribers, or use custom labels to send game-score alerts to sports fans who follow a specific team.”

Updated Page-Level Feedback – Facebook’s also providing new tools to enable businesses to more easily see how people rated their Messenger experience.

Automated Language Detection – They’re also adding in built-in natural language processing to help detect the language each user is using in their message.

“Built-in NLP is now available in Chinese, Dutch, French, German, Italian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Spanish and Vietnamese. The default NLP model is able to detect the following entities in all supported languages: date & time, location, amount of money, phone number and email.”

Facebook’s also rolling out their Handover Protocol, updating their Page Insights API and adding some new message tags, including updates on the status of an application and ‘pairing updates’.